THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

 Let me start by making a confession. I really don’t like talking about money. It caused a rift in a part of my family that had some, while the rest of us just got by from paycheck to paycheck. We weren’t what some call “dirt poor” in Appalachia, but we were pretty close to it. 

So when it comes to these latter sections of the Gospels at about the same time that we’re talking about next year’s budget and pledging support, I really just want to go away and join Thoreau in the woods, or maybe just sit in a garden somewhere until it’s all over. 

But here we are. Letters and pledge cards are showing up in our mailboxes, whether from our parish or other community organizations seeking support. My last parish had issues with pledge campaigns that always fell short, so I invited the recently retired vice-president of development, his successor and his assistant from the University of Michigan to talk to our stewardship committee. They were all active members of our parish. 

To my surprise, the current leader of that group said he thought I should go into fund raising. That pretty much fits my definition of a personal hell, especially if you add pumpkin spice lattes as the only beverage available for consumption. I replied that I didn’t like talking about money. But his point was that I get excited about what money makes possible. 

That brings me to ministry. And that, in turn, brings me to something I read many years ago. When we talk only about numbers, whether it be budgets or statistics, we’re engaging in the realm of death. Ministry, on the other hand, is about life. Ministry is about engaging the eternal life of God in our own lives and into the world around us. 

The Apostle Paul seems to be making that point when he tells his young protégé Timothy that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Not, mind you, as we’ve often heard, that money is the root of all evil. It’s about what we truly love, not necessarily about commerce. 
I mean, let’s face it. Churches in the early middle ages didn’t concern themselves with money, except when it came to buildings and their maintenance. They had altar rails not because folks needed someplace to kneel and support themselves while receiving communion. The rails existed to keep the chickens and lambs and other animals from walking onto the altar area and leaving their own donations on the floor during the consecration. Now we’re more concerned about wine spots and candle wax on the fair linen. But the animals, eggs and milk, and harvested produce were presented as an offering so that the clergy had something to eat during the coming week.

Throughout scripture we find some teaching about how we use the wealth given to us. And it’s consistent. Those who have much have much required of them. Those who have an abundance have it so that they can give something to the poor who don’t have enough.
Granted, scripture doesn’t talk about the necessity of mopping floors, paying electric bills, elevator maintenance, heating and air conditioning. It also doesn’t talk much about salaries, except that those who travel to spread the Gospel should accept what is given to them because workers deserve their pay. I don’t know about Delaware, but my home state of West Virginia says in its constitution that there are three professions—medicine, the law, and ministry. But, sadly, it doesn’t say that they should be paid equally, even though each at one time required not a master’s degree, but a professional degree beyond undergraduate work. Remember I said I don’t like to talk about money.

I’ve been asking folks here to begin talking about ministry, even while some need to be alerting us to the fiscal aspects of our communal life. In other words, I want to hear about how the money you give works in ways that spread the good news of Jesus Christ. I want you to begin talking about what electricity, heat, air conditioning, a roof that doesn’t leak, an elevator, clean floors and empty trash cans, and all the other stuff we spend your offerings on does to tell those around us about the God who calls the dead to new life. I want to hear your experiences of the risen Christ who calls you by name and shows up when you least expect it.

I want to hear how you help those who might also bear the name “Lazarus” even while you make those who own the gates where Lazarus sits aware that not just the crumbs, but the bounty on their tables also is a gift from God, and by sharing it with those who don’t have enough, they give it not just to Lazarus, but back to God.

I want to hear your ideas and experiences of how you’ve dared to name the darkness around you so that you might find the courage to carry the light of Christ into it. I want to not just hear how you’ve helped the many Lazaruses of our time, but also how you’ve somehow steered the gatekeepers and gate owners to God’s idea of real justice.

What I don’t want to hear is that you’ve thrown a little money around so that someone else can do the work for you. That is, unless someone else can do so much more with your supporting resources combined with others and you want to make sure you’re helping in some way. After all, none of us can solve all the problems of the world by ourselves. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to reveal the overwhelming vision of the God who is known as “I am what I will be.”

There is a scene in the movie Auntie Mame where the central character, who is very well off, proclaims, "life is a banquet, and most poor [souls] are starving to death."

​I substitute souls for what she really says. While the debate around the quote focuses on existential issues and embracing the wholeness of life's experiences, it's important that we look closely at all the souls implicated in that quote. It's not as obvious as we might like it to be.

Hunger has many dimensions. We must do what we can to satisfy the immediate need for others. But we are also called to name what is profuse in our own culture--the hunger for meaning, for companionship, and yes, for love that gives life and not just a passing thrill.
Don’t give up on the rich man until it’s too late. Walk with Lazarus to his table and invite him to join in the feast God has prepared for all of us by sharing the bounty spread so richly before us all. Greed teaches us that it’s okay to fill our stomachs while we starve our souls. Let your witness reveal just who is really starving to death.

​I substitute souls for what she really says. While the debate around the quote focuses on existential issues and embracing the wholeness of life's experiences, it's important that we look closely at all the souls implicated in that quote. It's not as obvious as we might like it to be.

Hunger has many dimensions. We must do what we can to satisfy the immediate need for others. But we are also called to name what is profuse in our own culture--the hunger for meaning, for companionship, and yes, for love that gives life and not just a passing thrill.
​
Don’t give up on the rich man until it’s too late. Walk with Lazarus to his table and invite him to join in the feast God has prepared for all of us by sharing the bounty spread so richly before us all. Greed teaches us that it’s okay to fill our stomachs while we starve our souls. Let your witness reveal just who is really starving to death.



 

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

At first glance today’s Gospel lesson leads to a fairly simple conclusion. Actually, that holds for second, third, and probably more glances. The conclusion? Today would have been a great day to be on vacation. 

As Luke tells it, Jesus gives us a confusing and difficult parable. While some have said that Jesus told parables so that he could get out of town before the authorities realized he was talking about them, today’s words continue to have us ask, “what in the world are you talking about?” 

There’s a dishonest manager whose actions catch up with him. He takes a few final steps to make sure he still has some friends around when he needs them by directing them to reduce their debt to his master. Then, his master praises him, even though his own future assets might be diminished. 

To top it off, Jesus commends the manager's actions as though to sign-off on how the world works. He calls the manager “shrewd” while urging his own followers to imitate the manager’s wisdom. It calls to mind words of a former mentor, who cynically said after considering current events, “never let ethics get in the way of expediency.” 

There is no doubt that the manager in today’s parable is a trickster. But then, that same word has been used to describe Jacob, whom God renamed Israel. The manager might be more aptly described as a scoundrel. If that’s the case, why would Jesus hold him up as an example worth emulating? 

Sure, the possibility exists that the amounts written off at the manager’s suggestion were his commission, and he’s letting go of what he would have gotten now for what he hopes might be a better payoff in the future when he runs out of money. But that doesn’t answer the larger question posed in the parable. 

Is Jesus asking us to be scoundrels? If so, then we need to dig a little deeper to discover the wealth, and the identity of the master implied in this parable. 

Okay, we’re in church, so it’s not a big leap to imagine God as the intended master. It’s also not a stretch to consider that all that lives around us belongs to God. We call how we use and care for all that “stewardship,” especially when referring to tangible things. 
But what about intangible things like love, forgiveness, and grace? 

These three things are, after all, the property of our Master, given to us to manage not as we see fit, but in the name of our God. They exist as part of God’s own being, and are made known by how we distribute, or manage them in the name of the risen Christ. The identity that we claim, that claims us, Child of God, follower of Jesus Christ, Christian, is rightfully ours not just because we try to love, struggle to forgive, and often act gracefully.

These identifiers are ours because when we love, forgive, and are graceful, God is present with us. This goes beyond the ongoing work of redemption, far surpasses our understanding of justification. It is the ongoing process of incarnation itself, that act of God that we celebrate late in December, but is not limited to one day each year and certainly not confined to the body of a newborn infant.

These gifts of love, forgiveness and grace are given to us not as commission for work well done, and not so that we have something to offer back in repayment. They are ours to give away to others that in some ways might seem at least scandalous to some, making us, in some way, scoundrels in their eyes.

But it is not their eyes that matter. It is the heart of God, in whose name we continue the work of managing the distribution of the wealth of love, grace, and forgiveness offered to all. Some may see the gift as an easy way out—you know, go straight to eternity, and show your get out of hell free card. That’s known as cheap grace, something Bonhoeffer readers will understand.

We all stand in need of these things at some point, something I learned one afternoon while attending a Eucharist at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I had wandered into the place after walking all the way up Powell Street, unaware that those who knew how things worked jumped on the trolley at the bottom of the hill. I looked to my left as I stopped to catch my breath, and saw the cathedral a couple of blocks away.

I saw a sign stating the time for the daily Eucharist, and spent a bit of time and money in the gift shop as I waited for it to begin. There were about a hundred of us there on a sunny Thursday in a side chapel a bit larger than this place. I listened and participated in the liturgy. Then a voice said to me as I rose to approach the altar for communion, "Here we are, the perfumed and the unwashed, all in need of grace and forgiveness."

It's when we recognize our own need for those things that we find we have what we need to offer them to others. And it is in the recognition of our need, and the offering to meet the needs of others, that we discover and remember that we are loved by the same Love that calls all life into being and joins us in it in some cosmic community that promises to last forever.
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So, yes, perhaps it is that we are called to be scoundrels—scoundrels of love, scoundrels of forgiveness, scoundrels of grace. Because when we manage them well, and offer them as freely as we receive them, we find ourselves in a greater company of faithful scoundrels in what will be our eternal home.

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

So, anyone else hearing the song “I’ve got friends in low places” after hearing that Gospel lesson? How about now? Earworms can be bothersome, but fun to make happen. 

It was not a choice for our Sequence Hymn for a few reasons. One is that it would violate a few copyright laws. Another is that the remaining lyrics express a very different perspective from Christian service. Then there’s the point that I only pretended to like country music for awhile because it irritated my brother when I asked for it on the car radio. 

George Whitfield, a preacher at the beginning of the Great Awakening, pulled no punches during his sermons, which could go on for hours at a time. A printer by the name of Benjamin Franklin in a town a bit north of here heard him, and offered to print Whitfield’s sermons so folks could buy them to read again. 

Whitfield was born in Gloucester, England early in the 18th century. He was one of those “methodists” whose fiery oratory caused him to be banned from respectable pulpits such as those in any Anglican parish. But he had his supporters, one of whom was known as Lady Huntington. Her peers were not amused. 

The Duchess of Buckingham wrote: “I thank your Ladyship for the information concerning these preachers. Their doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect toward their superiors in that they are perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common lechers that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and I cannot but wonder that your Ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.” Imagine those words spoken by Dame Edith Evans in her role as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. The good version, not the one made in 2002. 
Just who did he think he was, this Mr. Whitfield, by including the poor and hungry and homeless as those worthy of not only hearing, but benefitting from the Gospel? 

He probably thought he was a follower of another man criticized for doing the same thing. 

That man, Jesus of Nazareth, wasn’t alone. Even a cursory glance at the Hebrew prophets makes it difficult to avoid mention of neglecting the poor, the widows and orphans, the hungry and destitute, as reasons leading to the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the exile of Judah to Babylon. Ezekiel goes back even further, naming those same reasons for the destruction of Sodom just as a man named Abraham was making his journey from his homeland of Ur. That place, by the way, is the same region of that later exile. More about calling God’s people to leave the comfort to which they’ve become accustomed at another time.

Unless, of course, we take today’s Gospel to heart and refuse to leave unchallenged the practices all around us of neglecting the poor and hungry, of harsh treatment of those who look and sound different from us.

It seems that we, like Abraham, are still wandering from the comfort of an accepted and acceptable status quo to the land that we will be shown once we get there. We cling tightly to what is familiar, even accepting biases handed down to us. We work hard to preserve what already is, as if it alone is the kingdom of God we spend a few Sundays each year talking about before we’re distracted by a baby that, according to perceived mythology, never even needed a diaper change. Nevermind that “no crying he makes” mythology itself is more like diaper contents than true belief.

Garth Brooks might not have sung lyrics we would find appropriate for us this morning. But we might let our minds wander back a couple thousand years and somehow hear the soon-to-be incarnate Christ singing the title words as justification for becoming human and joining us in our earthly wanderings to the places we are yet to be shown.

We might hear those words again when we consider the meaning of a sentence in our baptismal creed, “he descended to hell.” It doesn’t get any lower than that. You’ll remember also hearing that early teaching tells us he pulled his friends out of that place as he returned.

So, while I’m at it, I might as well quote another familiar song title. “Love lift us up where we belong.” Anyone remember feeling years younger yet?

While the earworms battle for space inside our skulls, consider that God’s bias is toward those who find themselves helpless, who are told they are unworthy, who have nowhere else to turn, and God’s redeeming love not only joins them in their dark, lost places, but offers transformation through the transcendent presence of God to light their way forward. After all, it is in the dark, dank cellars of life where the Light of the World can shine most brightly.

So if we don’t have friends in low places, we might lose sight of that love that lifts us up to where we all belong as children of God. And to get back to my own preferred genre, let the double fugue of those subjects and their countersubjects be a most interesting counterpoint of the life we hope to find in and spreading from this place God has led us to, at least for the moment. And while you're at it, give thanks to Almighty God for continuing to have friends in low places. You know, like us.

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS